Full Frontal

Don't you hate when you run into technical issues, and the LAST thing you do resolves it?!

I've got my fair share of technical knowledge and skills that have been developed over the years. I tend to be one who is incredibly curious and always interested in what other people are doing, even if I don't necessarily have the skills myself. This has helped me quite a bit learn things. I often say that "I know just enough to be dangerous" meaning I would tend to get myself in trouble by getting into situations I didn't belong. It landed me here though, so fuck it! Lol.

I recently had an issue where I was doing some server work, and of course everything went smoothly for the most important steps 1 through 3 which are the biggest areas where we encounter issues. When I went to turn things back on and start validating that it was all working correctly is where things went sideways.

Being the level-headed person I am, I for sure knew that I was going to do the basic troubleshooting steps before asking for help. I got through those, made some minor tweaks and things, even reinstalled what I was doing but ultimately no luck.. I had to send out an SOS!

A colleague of mine came to the rescue, the one who has been getting me up to speed and training on the various things that I am not too familiar with yet and we went through a number of things. After 45 minutes, we were unsuccessful and had to call in more backup, so that was fun. It was a great learning experience because for me, the more I do things the more they get engrained into my flow and psyche. I don't know if it's a weird thing with me in particular but I love learning new things, especially if they are a bit of an edge case and I take that shit on for years.

At the end of the day, I guess it's usually the case when fixing an issue.. the LAST thing that we did ended up being the thing that resolved the issue. One of the obscure log files helped tip us off to the issue, in that there was a security step missing so we used a nifty tool that's out there on the web, ran it and bam it made everything happy. The funny thing is that I don't know necessarily what it did besides set TLS web security stuff to the appropriate levels, but I know that eventually I will be learning those fine details.

I thrive in these types of situations, as long as I don't have someone breathing down my neck. I luckily reserved quite a bit of time for what I was doing, figuring that I might run into some tricky situations with the environment I was working on. Thankfully that was the case, that I reserved the time because we used pretty much every minute of it lol.

I think one of the fun things for me with these types of situations is that it exposes me to so many more things that I can add into my own personal toolkit. I already have some people reaching out to me for assistance because they like my perspective and train of thought, at least that's what I tell myself to help me sleep at night. They might begrudgingly ask me for help because they have no other choice, but I don't know that for sure lol.

It was a fun few hours the other morning that's for sure!

What about you, do you find yourself in situations where you need to call in for backup? What happened? Let me know in the comments!